“San Juan arena expects sellout for NBA game, has hopes of landing an All-Star Game" v8, issue 23 by Brandon Rudolph

This Friday San Juan Puerto Rico is hosting a pre-season basketball game between Memphis Grizzlies and the Miami Heat at it’s sold out Coliseo de Puerto Rico. 16,000 tickets have been sold and range between 40 to even 250 dollars per ticket. There are even talks of bringing the 2008 NBA All-Star Game to Puerto Rico because of the huge fan base of the professional league. This is a good market for the league because of the country’s 2.5 million people and their huge appetite for professional sports. Normally for a NBA pre-season game most arenas’ only get 5,000-6,000 people.
The NBA is profiting greatly from globalization and expanding to other countries for business. It’s good for the league because their struggling here in the United States to bring back fans due to their poor image. The NFL is starting to globalize more as they just played a regular season game in Mexico and that was close to selling out too, and so I think many league’s will start to globalize their product as well as the NBA and NFL. The NBA is now starting to go other places to host their All-Star game instead of having a NBA city host it. In 2007 Las Vegas will be holding and quite possibly Puerto Rico in 2008. I think it’s good for the league to be expanding and it’s good for the teams as well who profit off this change.